


last words

by soggywormcircus



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Lambert's shoebox full of pictures from Earth, Pre-Canon, not really?? but also kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29240598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soggywormcircus/pseuds/soggywormcircus
Summary: Lovelace clears out Lambert's quarters. It's both a little more and a little less than she bargained for.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert & Isabel Lovelace, Alexander Hilbert & Sam Lambert, Sam Lambert & Isabel Lovelace
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	last words

**Author's Note:**

> watched the lambert stream. had a breakdown. bon appetit.

She's been standing here for- god, how long? It's gotten really difficult to tell how time passes. The station has been quiet. 

Hui and Fourier have been keeping their distance from her. They're probably worried she's going to explode if they get too close.

Lovelace really, really wants to explode. But she won't. 

She balls her hands into fists and continues staring down the door to Lambert's quarters. 

It's all fine. There's no reason to wait. There's no reason to be afraid. It's not like Lovelace hasn't done this before. 

Last time her arm had been broken and the entire station had been buzzing with _something._

It must have been fear as well. Shock, maybe. Lovelace had been too busy seething to find out, until she cleared out Fisher's quarters and everything was suddenly real and they really all were- 

Well. Grieving. 

Selberg sent her to bed right after it happened this time. He pulled Lambert's hand out of her grasp, ignoring the flash of terror in Lovelace's eyes at the thought of letting go. 

She hadn't had a hand to hold when Fisher had died. It was stupid, but she had the feeling that if she had the chance to do so this time and just let go anyway, it would be the end of everything. 

That was pointless, because at that point Lambert was already long gone. 

Selberg told Lovelace that there was nothing else she could do, and Lovelace wanted to strangle him. 

He told her to get some sleep. Right before she left the lab, he called out for her and she turned around. 

"If you need any help," he said, "like last time… you know where to find me." 

Lovelace's stomach had turned. She'd told Selberg no, she'd do this alone. 

Selberg had nodded, slowly. "Let me know if you change your mind."

Lovelace has not changed her mind. She went to sleep and woke up after three hours and now she's here, and she's going to get this done. 

When Fisher died, it had taken her weeks to even manage to go into the vicinity of his quarters. She could do it right this time. 

She didn't want to be so afraid this time, too. 

And now it's been more minutes than she can count and she's still standing right in front of the door. 

What would Lambert say? Hell, is there a protocol for clearing out the quarters of your dead crew members? 

There couldn't be. Otherwise Lambert would have told her all about it back when Fisher died, right?

But then again, who knows. The entire crew had been looking at her that certain way right after; like she was a ghost, too.

Must have been Selberg's doing.

That's funny. She always thought Fisher was the one to give the crew the 'Don't Tell The Captain' talks. 

Lovelace puts a hand on the door. She wants to do this _right._ She's the goddamn Captain, and she's going to do this right, and she's going to do it alone, and then she's going to find a way to protect the rest of the crew from this fucked up place, even though she told herself the exact same thing last time and now she's here again. 

Her heart stops beating for a moment when she wonders if she's going to feel like this next time. 

Next time. She could be standing in front of Fourier's empty quarters then. Or Selberg's. Then they'd only be three humans and one AI on the station. 

She tries taking a breath but it doesn't reach her lungs. She thinks she might be shaking. 

"Rhea," she rasps into the silence, the sound feeling _violent_ here, "is Selberg still awake?" 

She recognises the sound Rhea makes as an affirmative. "Could-" She grits her teeth, exhales sharply through her nose but it doesn't make her voice sound any less thin. "Could you get him for me? Please?" 

Rhea says yes. Lovelace tries to say thank you, but there's not much of a sound coming out of her mouth. 

God, she'd love to get to feel angry again. She was _so_ angry after Fisher died; not at anyone except maybe herself, and it had made everything so much easier. 

This, though? This isn't right. This is all wrong. Lovelace doesn't even notice Selberg arriving until he's right next to her, too busy trying to get her stupid breathing under control. 

"Captain," Selberg says and she jumps. He keeps his voice low as well; he's done that a lot the past few days. The times Lovelace has seen Hui and Fourier, they've followed his example. 

Lambert didn't like it. Lovelace doesn't like it either, but it's much better than speaking out at her usual volume. 

"Are you alright?"

Lovelace shakes her head, but she forces out a, "Yeah," anyway. She turns to Selberg. "Did you get any sleep?" 

Oh. Good. There it is again; her commander voice. Actually finding it again is a ridiculous relief. She's still shaking, but now she can ignore it when Selberg looks at her like he notices. 

"Not much," he answers. In his terms, that means no. Lovelace almost smiles. That's good; that's something that makes sense. 

"You should try again," she decides, "after this." 

That's all she says. She doesn't say, 'Will you help me?' or something else that would feel awful and wrong, like, 'I can't do this alone,' or, 'I need you for this,' or, 'Please don't leave'. She doesn't want to. 

Selberg nods like he can see the words on her face anyway. "Yes, Sir," he says. "Should we-" 

"Yeah." Lovelace nods, pulls her hand away from the door. "Yeah, let's. Just give me another second." 

"Don't have to do this right away," Selberg mutters. "We could wait. Don't think anyone is going to mind." 

"No." Lovelace shakes her hand and pulls the door to Sam's quarters open. "We're doing this now. We're doing this right." 

"Captain," Selberg says in that stern and patient voice he only uses on her, the one Lovelace hates so much, "you didn't do it wrong last time. You-"

"Come on," she interrupts him before he can say something worse.

* * *

Going through Lambert's quarters turns out to be a lot less work than going through Fisher's. There's not many personal items in here; apart from his thoroughly read-through edition of the survival manual, it's mostly just spare uniforms and one or two half-disassembled radios that must belong to him instead of Goddard.

It also feels a lot stranger than going through Fisher's. Lovelace keeps looking up at the door, half expecting Lambert to come bursting through it and berate the two of them about their disregard of other crew members' privacy. 

God, he would hate this. He doesn't actually have anything all too private or embarrassing tucked away in here, but Lovelace is sure he'd love to come back from the dead right now to tell them to get the hell out. 

Honestly, it's half of a surprise for Lovelace that his last words weren't, "Captain, don't go into my quarters after I'm dead." 

The smallest hint of a smile dies on her face when she realises she isn't actually sure what Lambert's last words had been anymore. He'd been asleep for a few hours when it happened, and she doesn't remember what he'd said when he was still awake. 

He didn't speak much, of course. The laboured breathing was already exhausting enough towards the end. Most of the time, Lovelace told him to shut up when he tried. 

A stupid feeling of dread rises up in her chest at the thought; suddenly, there's nothing else more important than this. 

She remembers Fisher's last words just fine; she had had dreams of those for weeks after it happened. But Lambert?

"Selberg," she says, urgently, "I-" 

"Captain?" Selberg interrupts her. They both turn around to face each other. "I think you should see this." 

He's got a box in his hands. 

Lovelace swallows. She makes her way across the room to Selberg. 

"What is this?" she asks. Selberg hands her the box and Lovelace opens it. 

It's tiny, a shoebox brought all the way from Earth, and it's filled to the brim with photos. 

"Oh god," Lovelace says, because she can't think of anything else.

This must be it. The one personal item Lambert brought into space with him. Lovelace's chest hurts and her throat is on fire. 

She wants to close the box, tape it shut, and flush it out of an airlock before anyone else sees it. Instead she clutches it to her chest as tightly as she can. 

"Should we-" she starts, "we shouldn't- should we?" 

Lambert wouldn't want this. Would he? It's so hard to tell, with the way the illness changed him and the way he might have already been starting to change before he got sick. 

"I don't know, Captain," Selberg says softly. "It's your decision." 

And Lovelace makes the decision, because she's a selfish coward and Lambert has barely been dead for twelve hours but she already misses him so _much._

"Come on." Lovelace takes Selberg by the elbow and pulls him along. They sit down on the bed and both just kind of stare at the box for a full minute. 

"Captain," Selberg says. Lovelace looks up at him. He looks… different. He almost looks afraid. Selberg never really used to look afraid. He just looked determined, and then he just looked tired. "I'm-"

He falls silent, and then he shakes his head. "Nevermind." 

"Are you okay?" Lovelace has put the box down between the two of them and almost regrets it now. It puts a space between them that feels like an entire ocean. 

Or maybe those kinds of distances just come naturally to Selberg.

"I'm fine," Selberg promises. He's lying; Lovelace isn't sure of anything at the moment, but that is clear as fucking day. 

"Alright." She bumps her shoulder into his. "Then go ahead. Pick one." 

She looks up at the ceiling while Selberg turns to the box. She thinks, as loudly as she can, feeling almost hysterical for a moment, _Sam, I don't know if you're still around here somewhere, but if you don't want this, give me a sign. I don't care what, slam the door or something._

_Just. Fucking do something. I don't care what. Anything._

Sam, if he hears her, does nothing. 

_Okay,_ she thinks. _Message received. I hope._

She turns back to Selberg. He's picked one picture. She leans closer to have a look at it and grins. 

"Oh my god," she says, "here I was expecting photos of his family or something." 

Selberg huffs out a breath that Lovelace decides is a laugh.

It's a picture of a work console. Lovelace can't tell what kind of place it might belong to, but it must be a job Lambert did before he got here. 

"Must have been worried he'd forget what things were like on Earth after years in space," Selberg mutters. 

"Or he thought he was going to miss it too much if he didn't remind himself from time to time."

That's a smart move, a lesson that Lovelace learned too late. She misses plenty of things about Earth. Sunshine, rain, the sounds of a busy city. It's all so mundane, all felt meaningless when she was home, and now she'll lie awake in her quarters at night and she'll fail to remember what a goddamn thunderstorm used to sound like. 

Lambert has more of those photos. There are so many of everyday things, a forest, a garden, a goddamn grocery store. They're all pictures he's taken himself. There's one of a train station that's so simply home for some stupid reason that Lovelace nearly buries her stupid face in Selberg's shoulder and cries until she passes out from sleep deprivation. 

Instead she just sniffs and says, "Fuck." 

There's a few pictures of meals Lambert must have cooked in the few months of training they'd gotten. And then there's birds, so many of them, some look like he's cut them out of magazines or books. Those make Lovelace wish she'd known about this box when he was still alive. She could have put them up in Selberg's lab, made the place seem more familiar to Lambert while he was staying there. 

Lambert probably wouldn't have wanted that. She smiles to herself, hands one of the pictures to Selberg and takes the one he gives her in turn. 

All the way down at the bottom of the box are the pictures Lovelace expected. 

"Oh," Selberg says, when the first person smiles up at him. He passes the picture to Lovelace but he doesn't take another one. They both stare at the woman, at her wide grin and her scrunched up nose. She looks nice. Lovelace is going to throw up. 

"Sister?" Selberg asks. "Friend?" 

Lovelace feels incredibly heavy, like the box had a bit of gravity inside and now it's loose and it's going to pull her all the way down into the floor and she's never going to be able to get up again. 

She says, "I don't know." 

She has no idea. Lambert has never talked about his people on Earth. Lovelace never asked him, either.

There's other faces in the box, too. They're all smiling and they all look like they're going to miss Lambert very much now that he's dead. Lovelace and Selberg don’t recognise a single one of them. 

* * *

“Don’t have to do this,” Selberg says again later. 

They’re in the mess hall, after finally sleeping for more than just a few hours. They’d both had the same idea, met in the lab with a sleeping bag tucked under Selberg’s arm and one clutched to Lovelace’s chest. They didn’t talk, just set up and slept there. 

(Lambert wasn’t there, obviously. But it felt better than being alone.)

Lovelace has her feet hooked under one of the chairs; it makes her look up at Selberg. She pulls a face. 

“Do you think we shouldn’t?” she asks him. “I don’t know if he- he might have really hated this.”

“Might have,” Selberg says, “but I think if we had same opportunity with Fisher back then… he would have liked that.”

“Maybe.” Lovelace looks down at the box, puts her hand on top of it so it doesn’t float away. “You’re right. Let’s do this.”

“Yes, Captain.” Selberg turns to leave, but before he can move away Lovelace has grabbed his wrist and is holding him back. 

“Selberg,” she says. She almost lets go right after and tells him to leave, but she can’t. She has to ask this. She has to. Her grip around Selberg’s wrist tightens. 

“Do you- do you remember what his last words were? Sam’s, I mean.”

She regrets asking when Selberg’s face- when it _falls._ It sends a wave of panic through her; she’s never seen Selberg look at her like this. He looks-

He looks-

Before she can find a word to describe it, she blinks and his expression is back to being unreadable. Maybe she imagined it. The thought doesn’t make her feel any less uneasy. 

Selberg pulls his wrist away. He doesn’t meet Lovelace's gaze when he says, “Will go get the others, Captain.” He nods at her and then he’s gone. 

“Goddamnit,” Lovelace mutters to herself, “get it together.” 

She turns towards the window and waits for the rest of the crew to arrive. 

Jesus. She calls them ‘the rest of the crew’ like that isn’t two people. 

Right. Two people, and-

“Rhea?” Lovelace looks up at one of the ship’s cameras. “Are you there?”

“Captain,” Rhea answers. “I’m here. What do you need?”

“Nothing, nothing, I just- how have you been doing? Is everything alright with you?”

It takes Rhea a long time to answer. Lovelace wonders what she was thinking when Fisher died. She’s not like the others on the ship; she doesn’t have any experience with things like death. What was she going through at the time?

Lovelace has no idea. The only person that might have known was- 

Was Lambert. 

Eventually, Rhea finds an answer. The words glitches over the screen slowly, like she doesn’t feel like it’s the right one. 

She says, “No.”

Lovelace nods. “Yeah,” she says. “That's okay. That makes sense.”

“Captain,” Rhea says, stumbling over the words, “I- what’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know, Rhea.” Lovelace wraps her arms around herself, wishing there was some part of Rhea that was _there_ and that she could _touch._ “I really don’t know. But look, I- I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’m going to be here for the whole thing, whatever is coming next. I promise.”

Her stomach turns. She doesn’t even know if she’s lying at-

No. She decides that she isn't. She’s going to damn well make sure of that. 

Rhea says, “Okay,” just a moment before Selberg comes back with the others. 

Hui and Fourier look… tired, mostly. This is not the same kind of grief they went through when Fisher died. This wasn’t a shock, it didn’t come out of nowhere. The effects of spending weeks, maybe months mourning Lambert when he was still breathing are etched on their faces. Lovelace shivers. 

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” she tells them, already back in Captain mode. Fourier straightens her back at the sound a little. It’s probably better than nothing. 

“Is there a problem?” Hui asks. Lovelace shakes her head. 

“No, no, everything’s fine. There’s just- something we thought you should see.”

She gestures for them to come closer until the four of them are gathered around the table. 

“What’s this?” Fourier eyes the box suspiciously, like she expects the next awful thing to happen. 

Lovelace crosses her arms in front of her chest. She’s not going to let it. They’re going to have a moment of peace and quiet if it kills her. 

“It’s from Lambert’s quarters. Selberg and I- we thought you might like to have a look through it as well.”

Fourier and Hui exchange a look. Hui ends up opening the box. 

“Oh,” Fourier says softly. 

“He brought them from home,” Lovelace explains, as if that isn’t obvious. “We thought it might-” She looks at Selberg. “We thought it would be better to not let them collect dust now that he’s- you know.”

“What do you want to do with these?” Hui hands one of the pictures to Fourier. He’s blinking rapidly. Lovelace looks away. 

“We… we had this one idea.” She looks at Selberg again, prompting him to go on. 

Selberg tells them. Hui seems to like it, if the small smile on his face is any indication. The others agree with them, as well. 

Lovelace feels some of the tension bleeding out of her at this. She feels foolish, but a little less now that the others are here. 

They spend an entire afternoon in the comms room. No one really has been in here in a long while, too busy with other things that seemed way more important. 

But the more minutes they spend in here now, the more of the walls they cover in Lambert’s photos, the less suffocating it feels. 

The room is barely recognisable by the time they’re done. Lambert would have probably complained about the mess. Lovelace smiles at the thought. 

Over the next few weeks, different crew members tend to find themselves here in moments of quiet, just sitting at the console for a while. 

There’s not a single photo of Lambert on the wall, of course. But they’re still a piece of home. 

Fourier moves every single one of them to Selberg’s lab when Hui gets sick and then they wander back in the box when the escape shuttle starts to become a real possibility. 

Lovelace doesn’t think of the box when she leaves the station, and while she does ask Jacobi and Maxwell about the letters later, she doesn’t dare to mention it to them. 

She thinks about asking Hilbert from time to time, those moments when she’s a little too tired and afraid to hate him. She never does.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!


End file.
